Monday, June 25, 2012

The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

Commenting on the interview on the Liblicense mailing list Anthony Watkinson said, “My impression is those pressing for OA, at least among the library
sector and even within UCL, have moved on. A roadmap has been produced by the information
officers of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). This organisation
is chaired by none other than Paul Ayris of UCL, an Open Access advocate.”

My
curiosity piqued I contacted Paul Ayris,
Director of UCL Library Services, and asked him if he thought the LERU Roadmap was at variance with what Price had said to me in
the interview?

Ayris
replied, “UCL’s position, as outlined in your interview with Professor Price,
is to my mind in line with the LERU Roadmap, whose composition I co-ordinated.
True, the Roadmap does not mention National Licensing approaches, but it does show the benefits and challenges of
the Gold and Green routes to Open Access and the requirements that both lay on
Universities.”

Ayris
offered to write a guest post aligning the Finch Report with the LERU Roadmap.
I agreed, and publish it below.

##

The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

By Paul Ayris

The Finch Report, which
was recently published in the UK, has
caused a storm of comment, even controversy. Responses have been lined up
behind the barricades of either Green or Gold Open Access (OA), and predictions
have been made about the destruction of the UK publishing industry.

Universities and research funders rightly worry about the implications of the
funding burden that full implementation of the Finch recommendations would lay
on them. There is much heat, but where is the light?

The Finch Report is, in many ways, an academic
study of what the authors feel is the future trajectory of scholarly publishing
to support research, teaching and learning, public engagement and enterprise.
It’s a laudable and important attempt to establish a leadership role for the UK
in Open Access — a country that produces around 6% of the global research
output.

The Finch vision is for a fully Gold OA world, where Green OA
repositories take on a role as a supporting player for grey literature and to
support University marketing. National licences to commercial content are
suggested as a short term win, to bring about equality of access across UK HE,
and to embrace new sectors such as the NHS and SMEs.

Where does the Finch view sit in a global OA
world? A new report by John Houghton and Alma Swan, financed by the JISC and to
be published imminently, takes a different look at the OA debate.

Houghton and
Swan have undertaken detailed economic modelling, something missing from Finch,
to compare the costs of Green and Gold Open Access if a university unilaterally
opted for either of these routes, or if the whole world changed to either Green
or Gold.

Their analysis tells us a lot about the difficulties of transition to a
fully OA environment. Their conclusion is that, for universities, at the
present time the most cost effective route is for a University to opt for Green
OA. Should the whole world turn OA, then their modelling supports Finch, in
that the biggest saving for a University would come from Gold (Chart 23 in the
forthcoming Report).

This is an important recognition of the
difficulties of transition. One of the weaknesses in Finch is that it does not
adequately model the transition to OA or the time it might take to achieve.

Another
recent publication, which also acknowledges the difficulties of transition, is
the LERU
Roadmap Towards Open Access. This document was published in June 2011 by
the League of European Research Universities as an Advice paper for its members,
and indeed for all European Universities.

The Roadmap was well received in
Germany, with a glowing tribute in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung. The document identifies signs and pathways for both the
Green and Gold routes to OA, and the benefits and challenges of all approaches.

A survey of European research universities found that Green approaches were
more deeply embedded there than Gold. The Roadmap therefore paints a realistic
picture of what faces a European research university in their attempts to
embrace OA.

In this context, what is the significance of the
Finch Report? It is visionary, bold and well-intentioned. But there are gaps.
It fails to appreciate the difficulties of transition to OA here and now.

Taken
with the Houghton and Swan, and the LERU work, a different trajectory for the
future of OA can be said to emerge. This is more nuanced than Finch suggests.

In the short term, a scaled up version of Green OA, linked to extended national
licencing, would help solve the problems of access to content that Finch quite
rightly is trying to address.

In the longer term, the Gold OA vision of Finch
(the Goldfinch) may well become the predominant model. But for this to work,
the whole of the world needs to turn OA, and that is not going to happen
tomorrow, nor any time soon.

The Finch Report is therefore an important marker
on the road to OA, but in itself it is not the whole story.

In contrast, LERU recommends mandating Green OA, today, and funding Gold only when Green OA has been mandated.

This is the difference between night and day, because it generates OA itself, in the fastest and surest way possible, and free of any extra cost: by mandating Green OA, today.

OA (Open Access) itself, now, is the primary goal of the OA movement.

Most of us (including myself) agree that universal Gold OA publishing will be cheaper than today's subscription publishing model -- but certainly not if today's prices are locked into the mechanism of transition to Gold OA, as long proposed by publishers, a proposal now seconded wholesale by Finch: extra funding for Gold OA today, plus a UK national license for all of UK's non-OA subscription content, with a phased transition to Gold OA alone (subscription costs being reduced as Gold OA revenues grow), effectively locking in publishers' total revenue at the level of their subscription revenues.

Hence, one can agree that the cost of post-global-Green-OA global Gold OA will be much less than today's global subscription/license cost, yet this does not at all imply that there is any agreement that paying for Gold OA pre-emptively now, at current prices, and on the publisher/Finch transition scenario, will cost less, nor that the publisher/Finch transition scenario is stable or scaleable from country to country, let alone that it will produce global OA in the foreseeable future, as mandating Green OA, today, will do.

So let us not, in our haste to praise Finch for having recommended "OA" at all, omit that it has recommended OA on publishers' terms, at a high cost and a very slow and uncertain pace, and at the expense of the UK's lead in mandated Green OA, which is the tried-and-tested means of generating OA at a fast and proven pace (if mandate adoption is increased and mandate implementation is optimized), and at no extra cost, just an just an optimized policy.

Finch should have recommended strengthening and extending the UK's lead and model, by increasing Green OA mandate adoption and optimizing Green OA mandate implementation.